Project Overview
Scraps is a 3d puzzle platformer developed in Unity that was developed by a team of me and two other Full Sail students. The project had you utilizing gravity powers to interact with objects in the environment and collect items along the way. This was our first full project done together as a team from prototyping to final build and was a massive milestone for me. We were given a premade character and a light guideline on what had to be in the project from each teammate. Each individual teammate made their own separate section of the project and it was put together as one single level in the final week. On this project I was team lead in the final weeks and was also assigned with helping fix/create functionality in my other teammates levels. Though the project ran into some hiccups, the experience was incredibly important with allowing us to understand the need for quick iteration and taught us about version control.
Video and Screenshots
Role in Development
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Created final portion of the project including:
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Creating the final section of the project
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Determining with teammates how the player was meant to “exit” the level
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Creating initial level block out plus map layout.
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Creating a detailed flow of the last section along with a map to coincide with the chart.
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Programmed sections functionality along with puzzle interactions
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Lead team in the final weeks to finish the project including
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Rewrote code in first portion of level to stop game from softlocking
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Adjusted puzzle respawn system to avoid player being unable to progress
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Figuring out how each level was going to connect each to each other with the assistance of my teammates
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Assisted teammate in rebuilding portion of their level after an error made them lose their project progress
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Documented general bugs and glitches while addressing those of the highest priority.
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Reached out to the proper people regarding error that persisted from beginning of the project.
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Post Mortem
This project was a wonderful experience that, in hindsight, would be done much better with the experience we all have now rather than back then. It being our first project we needed to make from scratch meant that we were inexperienced to handle issues that may arise, but gave us the ability to learn from our mistakes. Firstly, the beginning of the project increased our team stress as we found out that we had lost a teammate and only had 3 teammates total where all other teams had 4. We still were expected to give the same amount of quality/work but while this sounds like a hindrance, it gave us the perspective of what may happen in a real workplace situation.
The project had initially ran into many coding issues as we all were pretty new with coding our own functionality, but with time and effort I was able to adjust much of the code and fix the most glaring issues in the project. There was also a single bug that had us constantly having to resubmit our work on Perforce. This bug persisted until the last few weeks of the project, but we still ended up making a great project. On a positive note, the creation from prototype to finalized project was exhilarating from a designers perspective because it was great to see something come from basically nothing. There were no templates or any sort of help in the project besides the UI and character so that meant that everything in the project was going to be from our own creation. It is in this fact that I believe this project, while incredibly basic in retrospect, was a stepping stone for my work as a designer and the creative workflow I ended up adapting to.